Apologies for the very long quote. It’s from page 92 of Bruce Baugh’s chapter Experimentation in The Deleuze Dictionary (edited by Adrian Parr):
Life-experimentation, through a set of practices effecting new combinations and relations and forming powers, is biological and political, and often involves experientially discovering how to dissolve the boundaries of the ego or self in order to open flows of intensity, ‘continuums and conjunctions of affect’ (D&G 1987: 162). Active experimentation involves trying new procedures, combinations and their unpredictable effects to produce a ‘Body without Organs’ (BwO) or a ‘field of immanence’ or ‘plane of consistency’, in which desires, intensities, movements and flows pass unimpeded by the repressive mechanisms of judgement and interpretation. Experimental constructions proceed bit by bit and flow by flow, using different techniques and materials in different circumstances and under different conditions, without any pre-established or set rules or procedures, as similar effects (for example, intoxication) can be produced by different means (ingesting peyote, or ‘getting soused on water’). ‘One never knows in advance (D 1987: 47), and if one did, it would not be an experiment. Experimentation by its nature breaks free of the past and dismantles old assemblages (social formations, the Self), and constructs lines of flight or movements of deterritoralisation by effecting new and previously untried combinations of persons, forces and things, ‘the new, remarkable, and interesting’ (D&G 1994: 111). In literature, politics, and in life, experiments are practices that discover and dismantle assemblages, and which look for the lines of flight of individuals or groups, the dangers on these lines, and new combinations that will thwart predictions and allow the new to emerge.
The included references are:
D&G 94: Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari (1994), What is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell, New York: Columbia University Press
D&G 87: Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari (1987), A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press
D 1987: Deleuze, Gilles(1987), Dialogues with Calre Parnet, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, London: Athlone Press.